Edwards, Obama vie for anti-Clinton vote

Boston Globe: Edwards, Obama vie for anti-Clinton vote
Democrats go all out in Iowa
By Marcella Bombardieri
Globe Staff / November 12, 2007

SIOUX CITY, Iowa - Only a half hour after an impassioned John Edwards made his pitch to a standing-room-only crowd squeezed into a community college function room, a cheerful Barack Obama took the microphone amid a sea of voters on a middle school basketball court. Many of those in Edwards's audience in Sioux City on Friday gave up the chance to line up for the former senator's autograph, so they could rush to the Obama event a few miles away in the far west of Iowa, near South Dakota and Nebraska.

The two men running for president have trained most of their fire on their party's front-runner in national polls, Hillary Clinton. Obama was especially harsh Saturday night at the fall's marquee Democratic event, the Jefferson Jackson dinner in Des Moines, where he suggested that the New York senator has failed to embrace strong principles.

Yet despite the apparent emphasis on Clinton, Obama and Edwards are competing most of all against each other to come out of Iowa's first-in-the-nation caucus, on Jan. 3, as the only viable alternative to Clinton. The three are more or less tied in Iowa polls, but Clinton is so far ahead nationally that it is hard to see both of them finishing Iowa with momentum to challenge her for the Democratic nomination, according to some Iowa political leaders and analysts.

What is clear from campaign events such as these, analysts say, is that many voters who do not like Clinton are still divided between Edwards and Obama. Steffen Schmidt, a professor at Iowa State University, said if Obama or Edwards were not running, the other would shoot to the top of the pack. "In a way, they are each other's spoilers," he said....

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2007/11/12/edwards_obama_vie_for_anti_clinton_vote/